1st May – 7th July 2013
This is Mehretu’s first major solo exhibition in London and will feature new and recent paintings. Her large-scale paintings, which are built up in layers, employ a broad lexicon of drawing techniques together with a precise, muscular abstraction to investigate the intersection of politics, architecture and history and the way these forces shape the formation of our social identity.
This exhibition, which features five new works, centres around ‘Mogamma: A Painting in Four Parts’, The ‘Mogamma’ works, which were completed in 2012 shortly after the time of the Arab Spring revolutions, have evolved out of Mehretu’s investigations into how architecture and geographical space, particularly within urban centres, become sites for political and mythological projection. ‘I think architecture reflects the machinations of politics, and that’s why I am interested in it as a metaphor for those institutions. I don’t think of architectural language as just a metaphor about space, but about spaces of power, about ideas of power’, Mehretu explains.
For more info, please visit the White Cube Bermondsey